Chapter Sixteen

PAULA HAD BEEN HIRED by Martine and was starting next week. At first she was proud to be welcomed back so quickly, but then as she and Charlie walked along the banks of the Delaware River, she thought about the farewell party Martine had thrown for her two years earlier. The excellent predictions about her new life in Philly. Something about coming back in eight years, a veterinarian. Dr. Henderson?

The morning after that party, Gary had driven her to Philly in his pickup. It was early summer. She remembered seeing Jasmine for the very first time, outside the apartment, waiting to give her the keys. Jasmine had painted Paula’s room. White paint, what a promising smell, Paula had thought.

“Do you get high?” Paula asked Charlie, lighting the tightly rolled joint.

“Not on those things,” he said. “My poison comes in glasses.”

“I guess I’m feeling a little weird about everything,” she said, inhaling.

Charlie kissed her cheek. He decided that girls who mess up your life don’t have such warm faces, made warmer by the four o’clock sun.

“This river’s the real deal,” said Charlie. “Like a river Twain would write about. An American river. New York City rivers look like international waters, indiscriminately green or gray. This one is brown, with Colonial mud.”

“Like your eyes,” she said, exhaling in peace.

There were swans asleep on the rocks, their heads tucked away. So many clean white feathers. Docked pontoon boats rocked in the current. Church steeples across the river in New Jersey. Charlie was used to the East River, watching for cruise ships with Angelina. The imagined luxuries aboard the Sea Princess II were nothing compared to this, as ducks quacked somewhere far away.

“Washington crossed it just a few miles up there,” said Paula. “Our claim to fame.”

“If we were at the crossing, I’d collect a water sample, put a flower in it, and put it by your bed.”

“I guess, growing up here, you take it for granted.” She pictured waking to a wilted dandelion and took a deep drag. I want to hitchhike to a new country. One where there’s no one I know, nothing I’ve seen before, and no chance of return.

Charlie had sat by, once, while Monica Miller got high on her fire escape. There was nothing to do but watch her. It was emasculating to be at the mercy of a girl’s pot rhythm.

“Look up. Crazy clear skies,” said Charlie.

“Too clear,” said Paula. “I always expect to see a nuclear mushroom cloud when the sky is like this.”

“There’ll never be one here,” said Charlie. “Not on the banks of General Washington’s river.”

She extinguished her joint and turned to face him, made sure he hadn’t just been sarcastic about her river, then hugged him with all her might. He wished that things like handholding and pre-thermonuclear-war hugs didn’t make him so easily hard. He hoped she didn’t notice, but John had said that girls know. “They just know.”

“Thank you for coming home with me,” she said.

“You’re my home,” said Charlie, then he lost his erection, and Paula ended the hug.

John had made it perfectly clear: Hallmark Cards were the enemy of boners.

*

Dinner was all Chicken Paprikash, all the time.

“If your mom wants the recipe, Charlie, just let me know,” said Mrs. Henderson. “It’s not as complicated as I’ve made it sound.”

“They have a cook, Mom,” said Paula, anxious for dinner to end so she could sit outside by her favorite tree, where a tin was buried that contained childhood jewelry, her father’s Zippo, and the pendant necklace Gary had made for her, metal pounded into the shape of a dented heart.

“Well, that makes sense,” said Mrs. Henderson.

“She was more like a family member,” said Charlie.

“Can we do the dishes later?” asked Paula.

“We don’t have a maid, Paula,” said Mrs. Henderson, then wagged a finger at Charlie. “You tell your cook that the key to the chicken dish is the paprika. She has to get the paprika fresh, there’s just no two ways.”

“Angelina got everything fresh. I’m sure my mom will do the same.”

There had been two aprons hanging by the sink, because there were two girls in the Henderson household. The logic appealed to him. He wondered if that made him a male chauvinist, but decided it made him an American male, so he sat back in his seat like the man of the house. Paula had changed into denim shorts for dinner. How wonderful to watch the backs of her legs, apron strings dangling down her rear, drying dishes while her mother bubbled over with paprika caveats. In the Green household, his mother made the money but didn’t do the dishes. Angelina lived in an apron, and both of his parents wore pants. In the Hendersons’ world, there were pants or aprons. The pink and blue order of things.

“You want to dry, Charlie, and be next to Paula?”

“He doesn’t have to, Mom.”

“Some boys like to help.”

Paula threw a towel at Charlie that landed on his head, over his eyes, tenting him from the scene, and for a moment he was nine again, pretending to be a ghost while Angelina cleaned up after dinner. He preferred tonight’s checkered dish towel specter. A middle-class American ghost in a middle-class American kitchen.

“Take that rag off your head, Charlie,” said Paula. “You look ridiculous.”

“Be nice to him,” said Mrs. Henderson, before sitting back at the table and sighing. “Paula can be a little rough. She’s a bit of a tomboy, Charlie.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, she used to be. These girls are always changing. One day she’s a punker, the next she’s a princess. Hard to keep track of.”

“We’re going to finish the dishes later, Mom, okay?”

“Okay, you two go have fun. I’ll finish up. These dishes and I go back twenty years, Charlie.”

*

They sat beneath the tree of Paula’s childhood, replete with rope swing and the remains of a treehouse. There she dug up a metal box advertising French lavender soap.

“Savon lavande,” said Charlie.

“Wow. There’s a joint in here,” said Paula. She lit it and took a deep hit. Charlie’s pronunciation made Europe seem just down the driveway. It temporarily liberated her from what was coming after the weekend, another tour of duty at Martine’s. Gary and his friends would be at the bar, not only on her first day but every day she worked. He’d try to wear her down. Propose marriage again with another homemade ring.

“Do you smoke a lot of pot?” he asked.

“No, only when I’m back home, but this might be my last. Such a townie thing to do.”

Charlie dipped his fingers in her tin box, feeling the necklaces and rings of her preadolescence. He felt bad that they had to live with a joint and fantasized about replacing it with an airplane-sized bottle of Smirnoff. “Do you have anything to drink around here?”

She took Charlie by the wrist, inside the house, to the liquor cabinet. He’d never seen a plastic bottle of alcohol, nor a liquor cabinet underneath a Zenith Ellipse IV Chromacolor II television.

“My mom’s not a drinker at all. These bottles are probably from the seventies.”

“There’s something weirdly classy about old plastic jugs of nameless vodka from 1974, or some other faded year.”

“You’re weird. Make your drink, then let’s go up to your room.”

My room, thought Charlie.

“We’d probably be better off if we didn’t drink or smoke or do anything,” said Paula. “I tried it one summer. I miss that summer. I slept so well and laughed so easily.”

“You know what, I should do that, too. The Dignidad is no fan of overindulgence of any kind.”

“What’s the Dignidad?”

“Oh, sorry. It was my governess’s philosophy. A life of sacrifices and good behavior. A simple life.”

He toasted her water glass.

There was nothing that simple about it, she thought. He had poured himself a milkshake glass full of ice and Gordon’s vodka. Men always laid out their best plans for the simple life from the safety of a buzz.

*

She turned off the lights, but the shade-less room looked movie-lit because of the nearly full moon.

In bed, they kissed and intertwined and untwined their hands.

“Our hands are dancing,” said Paula.

John was spot-on about this: he’d warned Charlie that at night girls become pretentious about body parts, saying things like Our legs are heroes, or My arms will be your heart’s crutches.

There was an hour when they didn’t kiss or hand-dance. They stared, spooned, and almost slept. Well, he must have slept, because when she woke him, his tennis racket boxers were by his side. For so many years, Charlie’s nakedness had been famous, a rapt audience of one, every night a sellout, and now it was famous for someone else. It was in her hand. How had she gotten his shorts off without waking him? How could one part of him have been awake while the rest slept? How was she naked, too? He went to touch her between her legs. It was the newest thing he’d ever felt. Astonishing, that girls had hair there. Were they imitating us? Were we imitating them?

“I’m so wet,” she said.

Charlie couldn’t believe people actually said that.

“I am, too,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Take off your shirt.”

I wish I had gone to the gym more. Pale and soft, his chest hadn’t really evolved since puberty, but she didn’t seem to mind. She pounced on top of him, pinned his arms, and bent her head so that her blonde tendrils would tickle his stomach. He wanted to tell her to stop, that it was too much, too good.

“Are you clean?” she asked.

“I think so. I shower every day.”

“I mean, AIDS and things like that.”

“Definitely.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I haven’t really—”

“Are you a virgin?”

“Technically. I mean, define ‘virgin’?”

“That means you are. I’m clean, too. Just so you know, my gynecologist said I can’t have kids unless I get this procedure done. Something with the tubes. Still, you should wear a condom at the end.”

“Of course. That’s what I’m used to, anyway.” His abs trembled as she put him inside of her. “My thing,” he said.

“It’s a nice thing.” She was moving slowly, shallowly on top of him.

“My thing feels very good.”

“Good.”

“Too good.”

“Good.” She placed his hands on her hips, showed him how to move her.

He wanted to ask her to stop, to dismount so that he could calm down, rewind, maybe go to Martine’s for a nightcap. It hadn’t even been a minute, and he was awfully close to the end. This was never how it was at home, in bed. There he was masterful. A stop-and-start artist. A prodigy.

“I don’t want it to end, Paula.”

“Let’s not talk about that stuff now. Let’s just enjoy this.”

“No, I mean what we’re doing right now.”

“Sh.”

He wanted to ask her what exactly he should do with her hips. Her lesson hadn’t stuck. His hands were along for the ride, just sitting there on her flanks. Now was it over a minute? He wished to Holy God that it was at least over a minute. He tried to buy time by thinking about his grandmother and her funeral. What her decomposed body might look like. But his mind kept going back to the warmth on top of him. The click of her elixir. How does anyone last a minute?

“Kiss my breasts,” she said. “They’re sensitive, so start softly.”

He’d been to the rodeo once, at Madison Square Garden, and would watch the clock. He knew how long 8.6 seconds could be when roping a calf or riding a bull. What a motionless bull he was, a single buck away from disaster.

“Let’s do it in every position,” she said. She ground herself deeply into him, mining the depths.

“Maybe we could stop for a second?” asked Charlie.

“God made sex feel so good,” said Paula.

“God.” Charlie slammed his eyes shut, jerked his head to the side, into the pillow, trying not to be a spectator to his own horribly early ecstasy.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow. Are you—”

“I—”

She remained on top of him, moved her hips a couple of times, a futile attempt at revival.

“I just wish you would have told me. You weren’t wearing a condom.”

She was still on top of him, looking away. He’d slipped out, and she didn’t want to embarrass him.

“We could try again later,” said Charlie, wishing she’d dismount so he could cover up the mess.

“Do you know where my robe is?” she asked.

He didn’t know there had been a robe. He didn’t know anything. She found it in the sheets and dressed with her back turned to him, everything mercilessly luminous. Shitty full moon, he thought, bringing the bedsheets up to his chin.

She paused at the door. “Well, I guess I’ll see you in the morning. Night.”

“Night.” He tried to make the word an apology, but it sounded more like Leave, which she did.